Immediate Use of Firearms!
In German, mind you, so that it could be understood.
Sofortiger Schußwaffengebrauch!
Sometimes, you would see the Americans on the road at night. But then again, to me, with their white faces they always seemed devoid of light. At night, these faces had a tendency to gleam. You could see them from afar, and you were best advised to let the occupying forces have the right of way, for beatings were commonplace, while at the same time the white-faced Americans would meet with the German Fräuleins, as the soldiers called them, in the back-rooms of local bars for communal getting-to-know-you sessions. Even at home, on the old company premises, my entire youth was lived in the constant presence of American soldiers, sometimes the whole terrace was full of them. None of these Americans ever saw the inside of our bars, not the Dunkel, not the Schillerlinde, nor the Lascaux, where I spent my youth, a cellar tavern in which even we became lightless figures, running around like rats and slowly grasping something about the world that we were never to forget.
Over at the edge of the meadow, Forsthaus Winterstein comes into view. The windows of the main room shine out into the early evening, there are four cars parked out front, no one comes here on foot at night. The Forsthaus lies there alone; the family that runs it lives in the middle of the forest, completely alone on the Winterstein. My uncle parks in rank and file with the other cars, gets out and stands there for a moment, hunched over a little. Then he walks around each of the other cars, studying them with interest. He walks over to the paddock, but everything is dark there, not a single horse left outside. Aside from the fact that my uncle is almost forty now, everything here is just as it used to be, nothing has changed; only the cars are newer models. My uncle walks into the inn.
The hunters were there.
…
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About the author
Andreas Maier was born in Bad Nauheim in 1967. In addition to winning the Ernst Willner Prize at the Ingeborg Bachmann Literary Competition in 2000, he received the Jürgen Ponto Foundation’s Literary Support Prize and the Aspekte Literary Prize for his first novel Wäldchestag.
About the translator
Jamie Lee Searle is a freelance literary translator from German. Her recent translations include Ursula Poznanski’s Five and a co-translation (with Shaun Whiteside) of Florian Illies’ 1913. Other translation works include extracts and short stories by contemporary authors such as Anna Kim, Vladimir Vertlib, Ralf Rothmann, Feridun Zaimoglu and Andi Rogenhagen. Together with fellow translators Rosalind Harvey and Anna Holmwood, she co-founded the Emerging Translators Network in late 2010.